My Leadership Values
Servant Leadership
My leadership philosophy is rooted in the belief that an executive's primary job is to serve the (whole) team. I enable collective innovation and winning as a team by dismantling structural barriers, championing inclusive design practices, and mentoring emerging talent. Whether I am architecting specialized creative workspaces and processes or developing long-range strategies to reduce our environmental footprint, my objective remains the same: to foster a culture where diverse voices are heard, people feel valued and are empowered to grow, and the products we build leave a positive legacy.
Growth Mindset
A successful design practice demands the humility to remain a perpetual student of the discipline and an agility to navigate through challenges. Embracing a growth mindset means pushing beyond established areas of expertise, examining possibility, challenging convention, and finding wisdom and strength in adversity and disappointment.
Do the Right Thing
True leadership is measured by the decisions made when no one is watching. Doing the right thing means fostering environments where equity is built into the operational DNA, not just added as an afterthought. From championing inclusive representation across every creative cohort to engineering high-tolerance products, integrity means consistently making the difficult choices—reducing carbon footprints, prioritizing sustainable materials, and refusing to compromise on accessible design practices—until they become business as usual. How a product is made matters just as much as what it does."
My Approach
Early in my career, I gained a fluency in traditional high-volume plastic manufacturing processes and a genuine appreciation for the imperatives and success of my engineering, product management, and marketing colleagues. I found that by expanding my role as a designer to be an active integrator of their goals, they reciprocated - creating a thoughtful user experience and designing a beautiful product became a shared goal. Concurrently, collaboration, product efficiency, and employee satisfaction all improved while product development and bill of material costs came down. Thus, the General Motors Underhood Design Studio, my first experience building a new design team and process at a Fortune 50 company, was born.
Years later I would be given a second opportunity to build a new design team at another Fortune 50 company. The Comcast Global Industrial Design team was founded in 2013 upon many of the same principles as before. This time, though, I played a large role in developing the product development process internal to Comcast and with suppliers and factory teams for bringing the company's set top boxes, voice remotes, internet gateways, and smart home products to market. United by the purpose to "Make the world a better place" we centered user experience, simplicity, accessibility, sustainability, and circular design to earn the trust of our customers and a lot of recognition from the press and the international design community!